soliloquies

After yesterday’s school matinee (the only one we had, and with a disappointingly small contingent of high school students), we’re officially halfway through our run. Here are some more lovely moments in a play chock full of Hamlet-y goodness: Urgent Soliloquies: Even by Shakespearean standards, Hamlet has a lot of soliloquies. So it was a…

Thursday night’s premiere of Hamlet went very well, give or take a tech glitch or two. Friday night’s sophomore show was cancelled because of a big blizzard. So that brings us to tonight: Show Two, which was supposed to have been Show Three. I’m optimistic; I know lots of great folks who are planning to…

Last night I caught up with WJC on some of Hamlet’s soliloquies — “O, all you host of heaven,” “O what a rogue and peasant slave and I” and “‘Tis now the very witching time of night.” Although we spent some time on all these speeches back in the summertime, that was before we’d made…

We couldn’t put it off forever, so this afternoon, with no one else around to make us feel self-conscious, WJC and I tackled “To be or not to be.” I hope it will be the first of many intense 90-minute delves into this dense little goldmine of a speech. For both of us, I think,…

The second half of yesterday’s somewhat informal rehearsal was mostly dedicated to Hamlet’s first soliloquy, which looks like this in the original (Q2) version: O, that this too too solid flesh would melt Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God! How…

Now it’s time to tackle one of the Big Questions in Hamlet — or, well, maybe we’re not ready to tackle it quite yet. But we’re definitely going to walk straight up and tweak it on the nose. Take that, question! Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy, of course, is the one that begins, “To be or…

Released the same year as Franco Zeffirelli and Mel Gibson’s film version, Kevin Kline’s Hamlet stands as its equal and perfect opposite. Where Zeffirelli is operatic, Kline is utilitarian; where Zeffirelli is historically authentic, Kline is unapologetically modern; where Z. encourages his cast to indulge in histrionics, K. and his supporting cast dial it down,…